Intellectual modesty
byMieke Mosmuller
27-08-2014
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'I was born not knowing and have had only a little time to change that here and there.' Richard Feynman
One can understand that very well. Gathering knowledge about physics deepens and widens the gap between the human knowing-power and the actual structure of nature, instead of building a bridge over it.
However, other scientists who experienced this awe and mystery took a different path, they even felt more and more that nature must be an example of Gods thinking, just because of this awe-exciting complicatedness.
A physician can have such awareness too. Confronted with the mystery of the human living body, one feels his inability to develop knowledge of the living human body. Science gives some information about the dead body and about moments in life (all the laboratory and X-ray examinations, the scans give a moment-result, not a dynamic one). The doctor however longs for information about this dynamics, about the life of the physical processes. The scientific results awaken this awe and mystery about the human body, and the doctor says: It is such a wonderfully built organism, that I can't believe in God anymore. Or he can say: This awe and mystery make that I have found my belief in God...
Whatever one thinks and feels about this, one comes to a point of a 'knowing-border'. One experiences how little man can really know, how there seem to be limits to our faculties of obtaining knowledge.
Exactly here we find the point that should bring us to a turnaround. If man can't grow in his wisdom anymore, if he experiences the limits that can't be passed, he becomes a homo sapiens sapiens. The first sapiens has shown its limits and the second sapiens is born. On the moment that one feels his limits, the question arises: what actually am I as a human being? What kind of knowing possibilities do I have? How do I know?
In science we look outward to an objective world that serves us a whole of riddles. If one turns his inner eye to oneself, the riddle is not solved at all; it seems as unsolvable as the riddles in the world. But there is one point where we can look at our inner life, where there is no riddle at all. It is our power to give and solve riddles, to ask and answer questions. If this power would be a riddle too, there would be no possibility whatsoever to know something at all. Finally we find the second sapiens there. It is the realization that there is only one little point in the universe that we know absolutely for sure: the power to gain knowledge itself.
The Ouroboros symbolizes the continuous cycle of life, immortality, the totality of existence, and the wholeness (or oneness) of All. It is the renewing of thought by thinking thought. It is the wisdom of being wise. It is the beholding of thinking.Intellectual modesty by Mieke Mosmuller
One can imagine that a scientist like Richard Feynman developed this modesty about the knowing-faculties of man, because he honestly experienced the very little growing of knowing in a lifetime. For him, the 'awe and mystery' that he felt more and more to natures greatness didn't lead him to believe in God - on the contrary, it made this faith actually very difficult or impossible for him.
One can understand that very well. Gathering knowledge about physics deepens and widens the gap between the human knowing-power and the actual structure of nature, instead of building a bridge over it.
However, other scientists who experienced this awe and mystery took a different path, they even felt more and more that nature must be an example of Gods thinking, just because of this awe-exciting complicatedness.
A physician can have such awareness too. Confronted with the mystery of the human living body, one feels his inability to develop knowledge of the living human body. Science gives some information about the dead body and about moments in life (all the laboratory and X-ray examinations, the scans give a moment-result, not a dynamic one). The doctor however longs for information about this dynamics, about the life of the physical processes. The scientific results awaken this awe and mystery about the human body, and the doctor says: It is such a wonderfully built organism, that I can't believe in God anymore. Or he can say: This awe and mystery make that I have found my belief in God...
Whatever one thinks and feels about this, one comes to a point of a 'knowing-border'. One experiences how little man can really know, how there seem to be limits to our faculties of obtaining knowledge.
Exactly here we find the point that should bring us to a turnaround. If man can't grow in his wisdom anymore, if he experiences the limits that can't be passed, he becomes a homo sapiens sapiens. The first sapiens has shown its limits and the second sapiens is born. On the moment that one feels his limits, the question arises: what actually am I as a human being? What kind of knowing possibilities do I have? How do I know?
In science we look outward to an objective world that serves us a whole of riddles. If one turns his inner eye to oneself, the riddle is not solved at all; it seems as unsolvable as the riddles in the world. But there is one point where we can look at our inner life, where there is no riddle at all. It is our power to give and solve riddles, to ask and answer questions. If this power would be a riddle too, there would be no possibility whatsoever to know something at all. Finally we find the second sapiens there. It is the realization that there is only one little point in the universe that we know absolutely for sure: the power to gain knowledge itself.
The Ouroboros symbolizes the continuous cycle of life, immortality, the totality of existence, and the wholeness (or oneness) of All. It is the renewing of thought by thinking thought. It is the wisdom of being wise. It is the beholding of thinking.Intellectual modesty by Mieke Mosmuller